Posts filed under ‘Tutorial’

In a previous post I have discussed the benefits of Belgian Candi Sugar and have walked through the simple process of making your own. Using the adjunct in your brews usually involves adding the sugar 5 minutes before flameout. However, when adding the sugar at this stage time is needed before the solid mass fully dissolves and incorporate itself into the wort.

One way to to lessen the amount of time needed to incorporate the candi sugar into the wort and subsequently retain as much of its characteristics as possible is to preprocess the belgian candi sugar into a syrup form. The good news is that once you have in your possession some belgian candi sugar converting it to belgian candi syrup is a very simple task that we will walk through in the following tutorial.

Update: Thanks to continued (6 years!) interest in this post the content has been organized and updated into a convenient ebook format which can be downloaded from Amazon. Enjoy!

I have used Belgian Candi Sugar in severalbrews thus far and have found it to be one of my favorite adjuncts to use throughout the brewing process. Its use in the production of a beer can raise the alcohol content for use in styles such as Belgian dubbels and trippels without unnecessarily stressing the yeast or introducing undesired body characteristics to the beer.

Typically fermentation occurs when a desired strain of yeast is introduced to a solution or compound where sugars (specifically disaccarides or monosaccharides) are present. If compatible disaccharides such as sucrose are present the yeast must first break down this sugar into its fermentable monosaccharides of glucose and fructose by producing the enzyme such as invertase. However, the yeast must perform extra work in order to produce this enzyme instead of its more desirable job of fermentation. So, rather than forcing the yeast to perform this extra step during the fermentation stage it may be more desirable for the brewer to provide the sugars in their component simple sugar compounds. Thus enter the wonderful adjunct known as belgian candi sugar.